Abstract

The second volume of Jaakko Hintikka’s selected papers brings together essays from the decade 1986–96 concerning an often tacit distinction between “two competing overall views concerning our relationship to our language”. The first of these Hintikka characterizes as the view of language as lingua universalis, a single universal medium of communication; the second view, of language as calculus ratiocinator, is not meant to indicate that language is a “mere play with symbols” but rather that language “can be re interpreted like a calculus”.